Blood In My Eyes For You
BERT DEIVERT & COPPERHEAD RUN
Blood In My Eyes For You
Hard Danger/Rootsy
Bert Deivert, a New Hampshire native, now resident in Sweden, has been a bluesman for 43 years, his CV including spells playiung with actual legends T Model Ford and Eric Bibb.
It’s unusual in the 21st century to find the mandolin deployed as a blues instrument. Bluegrass and old-time bands are, contemporarily, its usual place, and until Blood In My Eyes For You, I could probably only list Rory Gallagher’s coruscating ‘Going To My Home Town’ as a mandolin-driven blues. Deployed percussively and pentatonically on Blood In My Eyes For You, though, this tiny eight-string instrument offers delicious respite from overdriven humbucker string-bending, and in Deivert’s supremely-talented hands, it makes a splendid contribution to a dozen rootsy and emotional tracks.
Corralling long-time Swedish collaborators in a Karlstad studio, Deivert and Copperhead Run performed live and spontaneously to produce this fascinating and delightful fusion of cottonfield and understated but gritty club blues.
Janne Zander, Fredrik Lindholm and Per-Arne Pettersson constitute a wholly-empathetic backing band. Every track, including two of Deivert’s own songs, is beautifully thought-out and arranged to play to the strengths of four supremely-talented and inventive musicians.
This inventiveness and feel sees Bert's mandolin doubling Pettersson's crafty funk bassline in his own ‘Black Nanny’, and is that a slide being applied to those delicate ultra-taut eight strings?
‘Death Letter’ too stands out, rescued here by Copperhead Run from a thousand derivative blues club maulings. Re-purposing a Hubert Sumlin guitar riff to decorate Son House's standard is a masterstroke, stitching together the diverse, but complementary strands of country and urban blues, and you can’t hear the join.
Deivert’s voice is deployed perfectly too, from the careworn resignation of his own ‘Cuckoo Crowed’ to the gruff menace of ‘Special Agent’ and ‘Poor Black Mattie’.
www.copperheadrun.com
Date added: Jun 01, 2016
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